Fic: No Justice series (7/?, not complete)
For the clexmas Bingo! Challenge
Shape: Individual Fill (to-be Blackout, eventually, we hope)
Prompts: Wild Card
Fic: No Justice series (7/?, not complete)
Title(s): "The Unholy Alliance on Shaky Ground"
Author: josephina_x
Fandom: Smallville
Pairing: pre-Clex, eventual Clex
Rating: R (to be safe)
Spoilers: through the entire series, takes place after the end of the show (after Apocalypse and before the seven years later). Background past canon necessary for understanding includes Tess and Lex both being saved by Superman after Apocalypse (Tess fully healed; Lex has his memory back).
Word count: 2350+ in this installment
Summary: Cracktastic fic series that starts with a red-K Clark who's been dosed multiple times recently, a worried League, an off-balance Lex, and a very unhappy Lois. Then the remnants of Veritas get involved and things get worse before they get better. There's a lot of Lex being treated horribly (what else is new?) and you may start feeling a little sorry for Lois as the pre-Clex moves towards Clex. She's not about to go down without a fight, though.
Warnings: Unbeta'd.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not-for-profit.
AN: #8 in the series is half-done or so already at ~1050 words. I hope to get that one done later today/tonight. I have another 9 prompts or so to go in this series. The AU's and things are obviously gonna have to be separate AU's and things, unless I wanna get weird and start having them visit the other Mirror Universes at some point. ...Hmmm, actually... *eg*
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Previously, in No Justice...
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Title: The Unholy Alliance on Shaky Ground
Prompt: Wild Card -- 2350+ words
Summary: Lex is tired but does stuff anyway. In the end, Lois gets her way a lot, as usual.
Lois wasn't real happy about how her fiance was cuddling Lex Luthor of all people, especially since Clark had been really out of it at the time -- still was -- and had gone straight to him. The man who had been trying to track down, subjugate, and now kill Clark for years. Lois loved him dearly, but some days she swore he had zero survival instinct whatsoever.
Then again, with the way Luthor had been freaking out about not being dead (really? wouldn't most people be happy about that?) and Clark's knee-jerk reaction to make everything better for everyone always... maybe she couldn't really blame said fiance for his actions. Especially since she'd even found herself reacting in a similar way to try and calm him down before Clark had stepped in. At least at first. Now she was really pissed off.
Clark had more-or-less ignored her for him, and the Luthor bastard had had the nerve to call her a liar. What was even more neurotic was how his words and, well, inarticulate growls, were diametrically opposed to his body language; he'd barely put up a token resistance to Clark at all.
Then again, he was pretty obviously out of it. Probably concussed badly, to say the least, the way his eyes had been rolling around in their sockets when he'd first come out of it, and certainly loopy from what was obviously-in-retrospect the first use of his powers, however and whenever and wherever the hell he'd gotten them. Scooting closer, she briefly wondered if it was really his mental walls that had temporarily collapsed, or whether he was schizophrenic or something. She'd had arguments with Clark before about whether he was a psychotic sociopath or not, and given that Tess was a recovering sociopath (or simply a highly functional one) who felt 'guilt' only at being caught and didn't really care about anyone but Clark, who she'd latched onto like a limpet, she had a known basis for comparison. But Clark always swore up and down that Lex had emotions, that he knew fear, and guilt, and love and loss, but that he just kept them suppressed or well-hidden, having been taught by Lionel that showing emotion was a sign of weakness. He swore that Lex had empathy for others, but refused to show it or act on it openly because he was afraid that he would leave himself open to being taken advantage of if he did.
Given he way he'd been screaming his head off in primal fear earlier, and his reactions to Clark just now -- which, if she was being very very considerate might be called 'grumpy' on, say, Mirror-box Earth -- she was going to have to toss the 'no emotions' hypothesis out the window. Especially since he was now cuddling Clark back with a really soft, pained look on his face. Because he'd passed out and couldn't pretend he was feeling otherwise.
She consoled herself with the fact that it didn't mean he wasn't still pure evil in another way -- if he was perfectly sane while choosing to do the things he did, well...
But that still didn't explain what had happened with Chloe, up in the top of the Tower. Saving his nemesis to toy with him later, sure, she could see that -- he was certainly twisted enough for it -- but saving Chloe?
She slid forward and put out a hand to shake Luthor's shoulder lightly. His eyes slitted open immediately as soon as she'd touched him, and she felt him try to control his reaction, to resist flinching away from her touch.
"Go 'way," he muttered sleepily, eyes sliding shut again. "My Clark." His shadows curled around him -- them both -- protectively.
She barely resisted the urge to haul off and punch him. "Stop that," she snapped, grabbing his arm a little harder. His eyes flew open and he tried to pull away, tugging and hissing at her.
She let go and he calmed down somewhat. "You need to stop--" Right, the idiot probably didn't even realize what he was doing-- "Clark needs to be in the light, to heal." And his shadows probably weren't helping Clark any. "Let go of him. I need to drag him back over."
Lex frowned at her, and looked past her, saw the lights. Looked back at her. Frowned again. "Your arm's broken," he stated.
"Yes, I know," Lois gritted out. It hurt like hell, and would certainly hurt worse once the shock and adrenaline wore off. At least the bone wasn't jutting out through the skin of her forearm. Chloe had been no help there, either.
"You... can't move him like that," he accused balefully, obviously not all there.
"Well, do you mind helping me? Given that we have a truce and all, until we've dropkicked the assholes who keep drugging Clark." And she'd meant for that to come out a lot more sarcastically and a lot less like a real plea for help.
Lex gave her a blank look, blinked at her, then frowned again and closed his eyes. He seemed to be struggling for a moment to wake up more fully and mentally put himself back together a little. He shook his head slightly, once. After a few breaths, he seemed much more cool and emotionless, if not entirely collected, and he grumbled slightly to himself as he shifted a bit away from an unconscious Clark, then struggled to help him slide down the wall instead of just dropping straight down like a rock. He ended up kneeling loosely next to Lois, facing Clark who was sprawled along the floor against the wall. He swayed slightly as he shrugged out of his suit jacket, then undid the cuff buttons at his wrists and started ripping the sleeves from his dress shirt. He puttered about a bit with the sleeves, ripping them into longer strips, then removed a few things from the jacket pockets and slid them into his pants pockets, while she stared at the two shoulder holsters adorning the sides of his torso and the gleaming silver twin semi-automatics snugly fit within, the several clips of ammo secured with loops and slid in the gaps, the knife sheath tucked at the small of his back...
She yelped as he suddenly snaked out a hand and grabbed her elbow, pulled her arm forward, then frowned a little and poked at it a bit with his other hand. She refrained from punching his lights out only due to the fact that she'd nearly blacked out from the pain, and that doing so would probably have led to him wrenching her arm around worse when he inevitably would have jerked backwards from the hit.
After a few more- and less-painful jabs under a clinical gaze, he said, "Hmmm," and then he wrapped his other hand carefully around her forearm down near the wrist and pulled.
Lois saw stars again -- and not the good kind -- and the next time her vision cleared her right shoulder was leaning against Lex's chest, her head was tucked under his chin, her arm was feeling much better, unbelievably, and Lex was finishing up wrapping her forearm with the remnants of the second shirtsleeve. She dazedly realized that he had whipcord muscles, staring at his bare arms -- whipcord muscles with no hair, no hair at all, and he was even thinner than she'd thought earlier dragging him down the stairwell.
Then he did something with his jacket -- folds and knots -- and before she knew it she had a makeshift sling over her left shoulder, taking the weight off of her -- yup, definitely broken -- right arm.
She sighed and collapsed a little against him in relief, then realized what she was doing and pulled away abruptly, sitting bolt upright. She eyed him warily. He seemed to stifle a sigh and slowly half-crawled half-slid across the floor to Clark.
When he started tugging at his shoulders in an attempt to drag him across the floor, Lois slid over and joined in. Between the two of them they managed to get him over to the lights. By the time they had him settled, all of Lex's little shadowlets had faded away completely under the warm artificial sunlight. And it was odd, she realized, having kept a critical eye on him throughout -- she'd expected him to become suddenly fatigued, or collapse, or something -- have some reaction to coming under the lights -- but for all that she could tell, all that happened was that his shoulders dropped a bit and he relaxed a little more; maybe looked slightly more sleepy, but that could be due to the concussion, because his pupils weren't focusing quite right.
Chloe was silent throughout all this, slouched against the wall, asleep, and for that Lois was grateful.
Lex finally slid away a little bit from them both, and, still fully under the lights, levered himself to the floor with a soft groan. He lay out full spread, one knee up, took a deep breath in, and let it out slowly, closing his eyes. She could almost visibly see the tension in him bleed out of every pore as he relaxed into the floor. It was a little funny -- he was making hard concrete look like a featherbed.
Or like he was lounging in a green grass field under the lazy afternoon sun, with the little readjustments he made, swinging and dropping his right hand over his chest and sliding his left arm under his head to cushion it, before settling in more. All he needed was a hat over his face to complete the picture and...
"Oh my god, you're a Kansas boy!" and she couldn't help but laugh.
Lex tilted his head towards her, stared up at her balefully and said, without any inflection at all, "So?"
Lois stopped laughing.
"I--" she started, feeling a little embarrassed. She hadn't meant it as an insult exactly -- it's not like Clark wasn't one, too, and-- What the hell was she doing?
Lex closed his eyes and waved his hand loftily through the air before letting it fall back to his chest, indicating a lazy 'Whatever, I don't care.'
Except that the way he'd tensed when she'd started laughing, maybe he did.
It nagged at her and nagged at her, and she had nothing else to take her mind off of it. She'd never really thought about it before -- he'd grown up in Metropolis, mostly, and spent a lot of time living in Smallville, as well, but regardless of all his travels elsewhere across the globe, that meant that the majority of his life he'd spent in Kansas. While Metropolis reminded her quite a bit of those East Coast cities she'd lived in at times, and her citizenry similar in their busybody urban lifestyles and habits, they really were in the middle of the Midwest, and had their odd little cultural quirks to show it. She knew from Chloe that he'd attended a New England school for his college degree -- and wasn't that weird, he'd taken biochem instead of a business major -- and that there was still some prejudice about dumb country hicks in the Ivy League schools, but she never would've ascribed that label to...
Hmm.
And supposedly Oliver and his group of rather not-so-small friends had bullied him all through Excelsior Prep, too.
She wasn't about to give Lex and Oliver and his buddies a free pass for whatever their actions were that had lead to the death of that student at Excelsior, but she began to wonder exactly what "bullying" had meant. And what may or may not have occurred in retaliation.
She also wondered what this world's Lionel had been like. She knew what the mirror-one was like firsthand, not that she'd ever wanted to, and she only really had thirdhand information on the former. Mirror-Lionel had jerked around Conner when he was Lx-13 and thought he was Lex, and jerked around Conner too, with red-K being his first line of attack and control, no less. How had the real Lionel treated Lex? Clark was open to talking about Lex, mostly in pleas for tolerance if not understanding, and to please just let him handle things on his own, but he didn't like talking about Lionel at all. He didn't quite refuse to, but he shied away from it like he had some mental censure going on inside his head. She wondered if it could really possibly be that bad.
...And that was a bit too much wondering. She really didn't want to feel sorry for Lex -- regardless of past history and how he had gotten this way, he was a bastard and he did evil things to good people, and trampled over others like he didn't care at all. Maybe he was a puzzle who she'd suddenly realized that, yes, damnit, Clark was right, she was missing a lot of the pieces to, but that didn't mean that she wanted to solve him, either.
Yeah, just keep telling yourself that, she winced to herself. She could almost feel the urge sneaking up on her, ready to pounce.
She needed a distraction.
She slid over to Lex and poked him in the shoulder with a finger.
"What?" he sighed out, in an annoyed and very put-upon tone.
"I need help with the supplies."
"...What supplies?" he asked after a moment, clearly not having wanted to ask, but having been patently unable not to.
"I'm not sure, but there's a lot of boxes around, and I can't open them on my own, one-handed, even if I borrow your knife."
"Mmph," Lex replied, unhelpfully. He didn't move.
"There might be pillows and blankets. Maybe food, or water. Or pain meds." She poked him again. "Come on." She poked him again and he grimaced that time.
He slowly opened his eyes like it was a chore to do so and looked up at her with what was clearly a very tired, very male "Oh god, do I have to?" look, and she resisted the mad urge to giggle.
"I'll cart things around, you just need to get them open and where I can get at them," she compromised.
Lex closed his eyes and sighed. For a long moment, she thought he was going to stay where he was, but then he grimaced and slowly levered himself up.
"Where do you want to start?" he asked grimly, like a man preparing himself for a walk to the gallows.
Lois smiled.
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(TBC)